Prime Ribs
There's a range of response out there now regarding the Prime/Cisco "discussion," from ogre_san's to handful_ofdust's to cristalia's to norilana's. And pgtremblay has what I consider to be an excellent "one step removed" post on the situation.
My own experiences with Prime, and by Prime I mean Sean Wallace, have been a mixed bag. I don't regret the experience on the whole, but I'm reluctant to recommend it to others. (The things that I've heard about that I consider most egregious all happened to other people, and would be dismissed in court as hearsay if it came from me, so it's up to those folks if they want to air it.)
Here's a sample of how mixed the bag is:
Without Sean, flat out, there would be no Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase - though he and I disagreed sharply over several issues leading up to its publication (but when you're part of a group of about five editors and officers all disagreeing sharply, that's not so noticeable.) Simply put, when Sean stepped in he rescued the book, which had become bogged down in a contract unpleasantness. And the publishing/printing arrangement he worked out with SFPA was a godsend, even given that Wildside keeps sending royalty statements to the wrong person.
Sean and I also worked together on my anthologies Mythic and Mythic 2. There was a time after the publication of Mythic 2 in which all you had to do to see me spontaneously grow fangs and claws was mention Sean's name. (I'm over that, by the way, though it took a while.) When it came down to it, this had to do with a discontinuity in expectations - Sean was extremely enthusiastic about the concept of Mythic, which allowed me, I suppose, to convince myself that he would push it and promote it with more vigor than he had my poetry books. In fact, as with Disturbing Muses and Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, I wound up doing 98% percent of the promoting myself, which was nerve-wracking as I'd plopped a good-sized dollop of my own money into the books. A snafu/misunderstanding that screwed up the debut of Mythic 2 at World Fantasy '06 didn't help matters at all; but I'm not going to harp on that, because Sean did make amends afterward.
Looking back from a couple years later, I think the Mythic books did well for what they were: they garnered some nice reviews and broke even (thanks to a lot of labor on my part). And I'll certainly vouch for their contents! The stories and poems expanded my horizons as an editor, and laid the groundwork for what I'm doing now with Clockwork Phoenix.
I view them as valuable learning experiences.
Most recently, I worked with Sean behind the scenes on Cabinet des Fees 2 and The 2008 Rhysling Anthology and was quite pleased with his swift responses to the various demands and crises that arose. If those were my only experiences with him, my impressions would be nothing but rosey glow.
I've been paid to my satisfaction for everything Prime/Wildside has ever owed me; I've also been pretty aggressive about making sure that happened.
I do think that, as pgtremblay points out, the Prime problem seems to boil down to communication, or lack thereof, especially when a project enters troubled waters. In 2005, when I first started working with Sean, he had a tendency to argue rather than explain, to talk in generalities about Prime Books' admirable achievements rather than go over what an author should expect in regard to his or her specific book (though maybe he didn't always himself have that clear an idea what to expect). He also had a tendency to change his mind on a dime as to a project's priority, without necessarily informing the writers involved. (One example: Jabberwocky went from quarterly to yearly to once in a while, and the pay rate for poetry went from $20 a poem to essentially pay-in-copy; but as a contributor to Volumes 1, 2 and 3, I only learned these things when I asked.)
I do think, these days, he's much calmer; though I am now by choice a bit more removed from the epicenter.
I also think Sean has reasonably addressed some of these concerns on his LiveJournal (oldcharliebrown). I do have a quibble, though. In Sean's statement about Cisco's complaint he asserts, "Yes, we have occasionally fallen behind schedule - and then we have always caught up again." Well, Ian Watson signed a contract for a three volume Best of Ian Watson set from Cosmos Books (also a Wildside imprint) that has never appeared. Enough years have gone by that no one apparently remembers Suzette Haden Elgin yanking her Cowboy Jones novels away from Wildside in frustration. There's a commenter at Cisco's blog who mentions signing a contract for two Prime novels in 2005 that have yet to come out (I believe I know who that person is, but it's up to them to identify themselves if they ever decide to.)
It is not fair, necessarily, to lay all of the above at Prime's feet, but there probably needs to be a clearer definition proffered of what "caught up" means.
My own experiences with Prime, and by Prime I mean Sean Wallace, have been a mixed bag. I don't regret the experience on the whole, but I'm reluctant to recommend it to others. (The things that I've heard about that I consider most egregious all happened to other people, and would be dismissed in court as hearsay if it came from me, so it's up to those folks if they want to air it.)
Here's a sample of how mixed the bag is:
Without Sean, flat out, there would be no Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase - though he and I disagreed sharply over several issues leading up to its publication (but when you're part of a group of about five editors and officers all disagreeing sharply, that's not so noticeable.) Simply put, when Sean stepped in he rescued the book, which had become bogged down in a contract unpleasantness. And the publishing/printing arrangement he worked out with SFPA was a godsend, even given that Wildside keeps sending royalty statements to the wrong person.
Sean and I also worked together on my anthologies Mythic and Mythic 2. There was a time after the publication of Mythic 2 in which all you had to do to see me spontaneously grow fangs and claws was mention Sean's name. (I'm over that, by the way, though it took a while.) When it came down to it, this had to do with a discontinuity in expectations - Sean was extremely enthusiastic about the concept of Mythic, which allowed me, I suppose, to convince myself that he would push it and promote it with more vigor than he had my poetry books. In fact, as with Disturbing Muses and Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, I wound up doing 98% percent of the promoting myself, which was nerve-wracking as I'd plopped a good-sized dollop of my own money into the books. A snafu/misunderstanding that screwed up the debut of Mythic 2 at World Fantasy '06 didn't help matters at all; but I'm not going to harp on that, because Sean did make amends afterward.
Looking back from a couple years later, I think the Mythic books did well for what they were: they garnered some nice reviews and broke even (thanks to a lot of labor on my part). And I'll certainly vouch for their contents! The stories and poems expanded my horizons as an editor, and laid the groundwork for what I'm doing now with Clockwork Phoenix.
I view them as valuable learning experiences.
Most recently, I worked with Sean behind the scenes on Cabinet des Fees 2 and The 2008 Rhysling Anthology and was quite pleased with his swift responses to the various demands and crises that arose. If those were my only experiences with him, my impressions would be nothing but rosey glow.
I've been paid to my satisfaction for everything Prime/Wildside has ever owed me; I've also been pretty aggressive about making sure that happened.
I do think that, as pgtremblay points out, the Prime problem seems to boil down to communication, or lack thereof, especially when a project enters troubled waters. In 2005, when I first started working with Sean, he had a tendency to argue rather than explain, to talk in generalities about Prime Books' admirable achievements rather than go over what an author should expect in regard to his or her specific book (though maybe he didn't always himself have that clear an idea what to expect). He also had a tendency to change his mind on a dime as to a project's priority, without necessarily informing the writers involved. (One example: Jabberwocky went from quarterly to yearly to once in a while, and the pay rate for poetry went from $20 a poem to essentially pay-in-copy; but as a contributor to Volumes 1, 2 and 3, I only learned these things when I asked.)
I do think, these days, he's much calmer; though I am now by choice a bit more removed from the epicenter.
I also think Sean has reasonably addressed some of these concerns on his LiveJournal (oldcharliebrown). I do have a quibble, though. In Sean's statement about Cisco's complaint he asserts, "Yes, we have occasionally fallen behind schedule - and then we have always caught up again." Well, Ian Watson signed a contract for a three volume Best of Ian Watson set from Cosmos Books (also a Wildside imprint) that has never appeared. Enough years have gone by that no one apparently remembers Suzette Haden Elgin yanking her Cowboy Jones novels away from Wildside in frustration. There's a commenter at Cisco's blog who mentions signing a contract for two Prime novels in 2005 that have yet to come out (I believe I know who that person is, but it's up to them to identify themselves if they ever decide to.)
It is not fair, necessarily, to lay all of the above at Prime's feet, but there probably needs to be a clearer definition proffered of what "caught up" means.